I don't know if I'm weird or if it's just normal to get random reverse engineering urges.
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when a sector isn't loaded it's rendered like it's there anyway, but empty.
So when you're at A05 and looking west, you should be seeing what's in B14. And you are... because B14 is empty. The stuff doesn't start to B13, which you can only see by traveling into B14 and loading that area instead
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you can REALLY tell this game was born on a c64. Each area is like 3kb. Loading the maximum of 4 of them would take up a massive TWELVE KILOBYTES
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This post is deleted!
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@foone is this border why the sector maps are 14x14 instead of 16x16 like normal people would do?
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I went and bought the GOG version.
The one I was hacking on was version 1.0 from 1988, the gog one is 3.40 from 1989 -
the main difference is the addition of Access's RealSound tech which let them play PCM sound effects over a PC speaker
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@phlip that would make sense, but no. the maps are really 12x12 since there's a 1-sector wide empty border on each area
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annoyingly the map PDF gog provides is the one out of the pirated version.
I was kinda hoping they'd rescanned it, but no -
and this version of the EXE is compressed with SEA-AXE, which UNP apparently doesn't support? ugh.
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I found a version of Stick Buster that says it can extract SEA-AXE but it seems to contain any-piracy stuff that breaks on DOSBox. arg
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yep I found two different programs that can extract SEA-AXE and both of them just crash when I launch them in dosbox or virtualbox
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so I'm just gonna have to reverse engineer this EXE myself like some kind of caveman
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@foone Try 86box?
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@jernej__s didn't have it installed. guess I'll go try it now
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
I have now tested 86box.
the unpacker crashes in exactly the same way -
went and found to other copies from other places, they both crash in the same way. weird.
Here's the link if anyone wants to take a crack at running it:
http://cd.textfiles.com/smmodem/ARCHIVE/SBUST24R.ZIP -
the program seems to do some kind of self-modifying code and then it ends up overwriting actual code with gibberish which obviously doesn't work
and we end up in an infinite loop of invalid instructions -
correction: the memory gets repeatedly overwritten before it ends up in the endless invalid-instruction loop.
I think it's trying to do some kind of unpackery nonsense but it breaks for god only knows what reason and it ends up uncompressing over itself
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wait this is shareware. did they timebomb this?
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no, unless they're getting tricksy with it.
Like, timebombed software sometimes doesn't just check the date: it checks if you're cheating at the date.
One easy way to do this is to look at what files you have on your drive. if there's a bunch from 2010, you are probably lying about it being 1994
